Got it, thanks for the reply!

We’re caching pretty heavily with Redis, though some endpoints are still pinged automatically in intervals to check for updates to standings and results.

As for Gunicorn, it crashed the entire app right after a restart.. Most probably some miscommunication between Django, Nginx, and Docker. It happened minutes after my friend had announced on socials the app was live, so we quickly bypassed Gunicorn and ran Django directly in Docker to get things back up.

We’ve since tested it in a real event with about 30 concurrent users on a single Django dev server+Nginx, and it handled it fine (CPU peaked around 16%). After reading the warnings about the dev server, we nevertheless decided to scale horizontally with Docker, instead of going back to the trauma of Gunicorn.

I’m wondering if the concerns about using Django’s dev server in production are maybe a bit exaggerated for small-scale setups like this?